Please join us to celebrate the launch of Baby Schema by Isabel Galleymore, a Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation 2024.

The reading will be hosted by Jorie Graham. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

In Isabel Galleymore’s second collection, the adorable other is not just an imagined future child, but also a tree frog, a weather-worn statue and often the speaker herself, who dreams of quitting adulthood and an endangered world. ‘Mother Earth’ is less an entity to be revered than a command to care-giving. Lyrics and syllabically-constrained fables examine the play and power involved in creating new life, whether biologically or via cartoonists animation.

Galleymore hones in on cuteness and its relationships to hyper-capitalism and environmental crisis to produce a deliberately queasy ecopoetics. Animal extinctions are likened to failed businesses and sainthood is granted to a dubious character named Michael Mouse. Studies of wild creatures join those of pets, pot plants and animal videos: here is a new nature – one shaped by the extremes of our contemporary desires.

About the speakers:

Isabel Galleymore’s first collection, Significant Other, won the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize and Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, UK and a Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study 2022-23.

Jorie Graham is the author of fifteen collections of poems. Her poetry has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize (UK), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the International Nonino Prize, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.